Managing sales
Graham Trickey,
Editor, Graduate Prospects
- November 2007.
Sales management is the goal for career minded sales staff. As leader of the sales effort, the manager has high earnings potential as well as the opportunity to make significant decisions, which if all goes well, will have demonstrable financial results.
Even more than the sales rank and file, their leaders are crucial to the profitability and success of organisations of many types that need customers. Roles are numerous, though claiming them may involve getting ahead of many competitive and assertive rivals, the sales profession being what it is. An outstanding sales track record, rather than length of experience, will clinch the job.
Managerial jobs range from leader of a small team to sales director of a global corporation. At the lower end of this scale, the team leader continues to sell more or less full time to potential customers, while motivating and directing colleagues.
Team captain
 In order to lead a team with authority the manager has to be a top sales performer, capable of doing everything the rest of the team are asked to do. In addition, admin, budgeting, reporting and organisational tasks require action. But the over-arching responsibility is to hit team targets which have been passed down from above.
Calmness is a useful quality for the team manager. Crucial factors determining whether the team target is achieved are beyond direct control. Colleagues are exhorted, threatened and offered inducements to get them to perform, but will have bad days as well as good ones. Then there is the unpredictability of customers and market trends.
The team manager hopes to prevail by ensuring that the team calls or visits the maximum number of potential customers. Close supervision is maintained to see that the contacts are being made, including in telesales listening in to calls. Results are tracked on spreadsheets as they inch towards the individual and team targets.
Senior service
At higher levels of sales management, intensive selling is increasingly left to others. Senior managers may deal with strategic customers and high value orders, depending on the field in which they are working. They also pick up various client issues passed up from the sales teams – perhaps about terms of a potential sale or a customer’s individual requirements.
In some cases negotiations may extend to other areas of the company responsible for manufacturing or delivering the product that is being sold. Discounts offered to customers by individual reps may need routine approval.
However, the main work now is in organising and driving on the whole sales organisation to achieve targets. At senior levels sales managers and directors may actually be setting overall targets as well as allocating them among their teams.
Recruiting and training staff, allocating territories and responsibilities, and monitoring performance are other jobs to be done. There will be carrot-and-stick work: decisions on disciplinary matters where staff do not deliver and on payments of commission to those who do.
The senior manager is not just a power within the sales operation but also often within the whole division or company. Top sales staff can be involved in developing sales, product and marketing strategies along with senior managers from other departments. The sales maanger has important knowledge to contribute on their organisation's customers and what sells. They may also, via the customers, come across useful intelligence about what rival companies are doing.
Tying up the loose ends
Orders successfully agreed are not the end of the matter both for the sales manager and the rest of the sales staff. Each order must be processed correctly so that it can be passed to some other arm of the organisation to be put into effect. The manager sees that the necessary systems are in place and being operated properly by sales staff. In particular fields, sales staff may also be concerned with after-sales support in a continuous relationship with customers.
Likewise managers are at pains to see that the financial side of order processing works properly. The paperwork, albeit electronic, has to be carried out in such a way that it is legally binding.
Ultimately bringing in the money is what it is all about for the sales manager. The successful manager is money motivated and measures achievement in large sums. The financial success of the sales team or department is closely bound up with the pay of the managers themselves. Earnings usually involve a large element of commission or bonus.
The size of the sums earned depends on the part of the sales profession in which the manager is working, perhaps something in the £20,000s as a middle manager selling something like double-glazing to consumers, but heading towards £100,000, or even more, at the summit of some business-to-business and financial sales careers. It’s the thought of such lucre that tempts people into sales careers.
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Suggestions to editorial@prospects.ac.uk
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